Looks like some older spam accounts (which were never banned / removed even though their profiles are full of feedback regarding spamming) have become active again, as evidenced by spam messages all over the forum...

Please don't worry about spam links in user profiles; these profiles may only be viewed if you're logged in, so these links do not "boost" any google rating for the links spammed. Just don't click them, but I think that's only common sense

Whenever someone spams the forum, we'd like to ban the IP address (or address block, depending on location) and delete the user. The problem is, there is no way to figure out what the IP address was after the message has been disapproved. Disapproved messages get logged, but those log entries do not contain information about the IP address or even the username. If we somehow figured out the spammer's username from other sources, that doesn't help with the IP address problem. The IP address from which the user registered can be seen from the control panel, but that is often not the same as the IP address where the actual spam messages come from.

So, when disapproving the message, it'd be neat if you could write the username and the IP address of the spammer in the "further information" field on the disapproval page, like "spam from 198.51.100.42, joespammer" or "spam from 2001:db8::42, AnotherSpammer". This way the offending IP address and the username would show up in the logs and forum admins could then ban the appropriate IP addresses and delete the spammer user accounts. Thanks

N.B. If you're travelling in China, Russia or Ukraine, don't rely on being able to access the forum while on the road. Large netblocks from those countries have been blocked from the forum due to spam.

Money makes the world go round. We track how the money goes round the world.EBT Tech WG leader. Do not PM me if your question is not related to Tech WG or the association.

A quick update to the above. phpBB v3.1 improved the logging a bit. Now it displays this in the log:

Disapproved topic “testing post approval” written by “spam_test_user” for the following reason» The reported message has the only purpose to advertise for a website or another product.

There isn't that much spam on the forum nowadays, so perhaps we can forget about adding new IP addresses to the blocked IP addresses list for now. From now on it suffices to click the "Disapprove" button when you see spam. There's no need to write anything to the extra information field, unless you feel it'd be useful to record the IP address of the disapproved post.

Money makes the world go round. We track how the money goes round the world.EBT Tech WG leader. Do not PM me if your question is not related to Tech WG or the association.